


Better Together

by ThatAloneOne



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Blanket Permission, F/F, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Femslash February, Femslash February 2017, Five AUs where things turn out better, Fluff and Angst, also feat. cameos from Danny; Kirsch; and Theo, and then one more AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-14
Updated: 2017-02-14
Packaged: 2018-09-23 15:02:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9662495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/ThatAloneOne
Summary: Things always turn out for the better when Laura and Carmilla are together, no matter how it starts.Better together when it starts worse, when it starts elsewhere, when it starts early, when it starts late, when it starts from the middle. Start from any time, any place, and they'll go far.(And the time it would have been better, if they'd only made it in time.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! Enjoy the angst. And the fluff. But mostly the angst.

**1\. Starting Worse**

 

"Darling," Lilita said, menacingly sweet, and Carmilla winced. Everything still echoed oddly, without the drowning blood around her. "Mircalla, look at me."

Carmilla looked, reluctant, even the thin streams of light trickling in from the hallway lights enough to burn her eyes. Lilita stood ramrod straight in the door, the light wrapping around her edges so precisely that the details of her form were deep in shadow. She looked the same as she had when she’d interred Carmilla… she didn’t know how many years ago. She’d lost track of when she had been asleep and when she had been awake. “Yes?”

Her voice cracked, and Carmilla swallowed hard, the ghost of century-old blood still lingering on her tongue. Lilita smiled, precisely, and Carmilla's bones shivered. She could see the brewing schemes, even after so long. Some skills, you couldn’t lose. “I have another task for you."

Carmilla wanted to scream, wanted to break down on the spot. She was still scrubbed and raw with black specks of blood under her nails. Hadn't she been punished enough? _When_  would she be punished enough? 

But even begging would never be enough. 

Carmilla inclined her head, unsettled at the feeling of soft hair at the nape of her neck. She was glad, for once, that she wasn't human. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear sweat-slicked skin. "Anything, Maman." 

Lilita regarded Carmilla for a moment, full of twisted pride. The light seemed to writhe around her, like it too wanted to flee. Finally, she gave a slight nod and stepped aside. Carmilla squinted at the sudden brightness. "I'm so glad you said that, Mircalla. I'll need you deal with _her_."

In Lilita's place, there was a girl. She must’ve been cowering behind Carmilla’s mother the entire conversation, scared enough to be silent. She couldn’t have been more than an inch shorter than Carmilla, but she seemed tiny, collapsed into herself. Unlike Carmilla, newly clean and twitching from it, she was drenched in blood. 

On instinct, Carmilla took her first deep breath in a century and had to gag back the sudden suffocating miasma of blood. The girl was drenched in her own blood, cascading down her front, soaked through the fabric and clinging in a crust to the ends of her honey-blonde hair. What she smelled like otherwise, Carmilla couldn’t tell, too busy resisting the urge to clap her hands to her face. She didn’t ever want to smell that again she didn’t- 

Lilita shoved the girl, sending her stumbling into Carmilla's cave of a room. The girl's eyes were wild in the dark; tear tracks obvious down her cheeks. Next to her, Lilita was calm and collected, like Carmilla and the new stranger were the one who were taking this interaction wrong. "Thank you, dear. I'll be back to check on you.... later."

Lilita nudged the girl a little more forwards, ignoring her flinch, and closed the door after herself with a solid _click_. That left Carmilla with a mind soaked in madness and a girl who wasn’t moving. 

Moving... at all. Horror crept over her skin, drowning as the coffin of blood. The girl wasn't breathing. Hadn't been, the whole time. Carmilla would have heard it, with her senses still desperately tuned to anything that wasn't a never-ending sloshing and the sound of her flooded useless breaths. 

Then the girl blinked. A few times, very fast, like she waking up. Her eyes were a chocolate sort of brown, if Carmilla was remembering right. It had been so long since she'd seen anything but darkness. Whatever colour they were, they looked… kind. "Are you okay?"

Carmilla lifted her head, her dead heart almost seeming to stutter. Light leaked in from around the doorframe, enough to see in, but not enough to sting. It was the most comfortable she’d been in- "I- what?"

The girl came back to life almost comically, her chest rising and falling, her features reassembling into concern instead of fear. Without Lilita by her side, she was an entire new person. Carmilla knew by painstaking experience how that felt. 

"I know I'm uh..." a trailed off thought, a moment without breath or movement. Carmilla risked another breath, just to check, and the girl smelled dead under the fresh human blood. Turned or no, she didn’t act like she was. "But do you need help?" A delicate bob of her throat, and Carmilla noticed a pale line. Her face was clean of blood, a distinct cutoff of everything above that line. Carmilla’s throat throbbed, but the girl still didn’t seem bothered by the fact she’d recently had her neck spilled out. “If you wanted, maybe we could... help each other?"

Carmilla blinked, too, though she didn't need to. She took another breath — through her mouth this time, a steadying feeling even without a need for oxygen. Slowly, still enveloped in the comforting darkness, she nodded. 

 

**2\. Starting Elsewhere**

The most galling part of the endless digging was the fact that Silas considered it a class. In fact, they considered it _multiple_  classes. Depending on how strong you were, you were placed in an 'appropriately challenging curriculum’. Whoever they had hired for PR was doing an amazing job, not that Laura could particularly appreciate it from the mines. 

Laura was in amateur excavation. It was one of the lowest levels, for the weaklings and the Zeta outcasts. They had the same class length as everyone else — twelve hours in the dark and grit — but they were expected to do less. It was fortunate. If the class didn’t live up to the quota, they’d skip straight over regular punishments and take a frankly dictatorial throw-someone-into-an-endless-pit tactic.  

It was effective. Laura hated that it worked, but ever since SJ had disappeared into the maw of the earth, she’d doubled her progress.

They also got marked, which was insult to injury. Laura had a C in pickaxe skills. She'd never had a C before in her life! Unless you counted fifth grade music, but Laura didn’t. Her recorder was possessed, okay? There was no other way it could have made that screeching noise. Laura was a perfectly proficient musician under normal circumstances. 

And in the vein of abnormal circumstances, there was a new supervisor watching over the class today. Under her opposite-of-watchful gaze, work had nearly ground to a halt. Kirsch — a Zeta Laura had heard was outcast for helping clear a section for a girl with a cold — had abandoned his pickaxe to hang from a crack a long while ago. Currently, he was engaged in the useless activity of trying to flirt with Natalie. 

Sometimes, Laura thought about the fact that being morally decent merited the same kind of situation as being physically weak. 

In the single way the new supervisor was similar to the old one, she had taken to lingering on one of the ledges along the side of the pit. She’d scaled the steep gravel slope with ease, and had spent the rest of the workday staring disinterestedly at a wall. She wasn't wearing much, even in the deep-earth chill, which told Laura a lot. The new supervisor wasn't a recruited goon like Theo had been — this new supervisor was a vampire. A vampire who liked leather. 

Laura could work with vampire. Theo? Not so much. He’d considered the difference of a few inches to mean Laura shouldn’t have existed on the same plane of existence as his smarmy, muscley self. 

As Laura got closer and closer, panting her way up the gravel slope with her pick dangling from one hand, she couldn't help but wonder what Theo would have thought of _her_. She was nearly as short as Laura. For once, she wished that Theo was around. She couldn’t imagine how the new supervisor would react to Theo trying out his shtick. Everyone in the cavern would appreciate seeing him filleted. 

Laura had taken a short break right below the ledge, so she hauled herself up over the edge and stood with a minimum of panting. She was proud of herself, but the positive emotion didn’t last long. 

"Get back to work or whatever," Carmilla said. Her one nod to her position was a tiny nametag, pinned upside down over her heart. If vampires had a heart. Was it still there? Did it still beat? Laura was tempted to ask. "Rah rah Silas junior diggers." 

"Excuse me," Laura said, affronted. She scowled at Carmilla, her arms crossed tight enough that her pick dug uncomfortably into her bicep. She would say one thing for this joke of a course — it was giving her amazing muscles. "It's amateur excavator, actually."

Carmilla looked up, seeming almost surprised to see Laura upright. She couldn't have been a pretty sight after six hours on the job. Unlike _some people_ , Laura didn't slack off. Laura knew she had to be coated in whatever weird mineral this cave was made of. Carmilla, of course, was pristine. "Well, excuse me, cutie." Her voice dripped with sarcasm. "Amateur excavator. Get back to excavating, then."

Laura had to drop her arms at that, or she would have gouged herself with her own pick. Carmilla looked amused, her eyes flickering back and forth between Laura and her pick, daring her to brandish it like another student had an hour ago. He was still wheezing on a ledge a couple meters below them, clutching his wrist. The pick itself was embedded in the wall across the cavern. It was meant to be intimidating, but it didn’t work on Laura. "I would _love_  to keep working," a complete and utter lie, "but you aren't doing your job!" 

Carmilla snorted. For an intimidating creature of the night, she acted more like an irritated teenager.  "What job? Standing here and intimidating you nimrods into doing Mother's ill-fated work? I think I'm doing that just fine."

Laura thrust out an arm, pointing at the seething crowd below. Without an oppressive presence lingering over the students, they were starting to congregate. Ordinarily, Laura would have been all for an uprising, but she knew better. It had to be _organized_. Not like this. Not with them all starving. Even in the brief moment, her arm was shaking from holding it horizontal. "Look at them. They're hungry, they're tired, and they're digging in the wrong direction. You have to do _something_."

Carmilla watched her, eyes hooded and blank. Laura could see her words going in one ear and out the other. Her blood boiled. She stepped right up in Carmilla's personal space, jabbing a finger at her. "This is your project! You're the one who has them digging a hole to China!"

Carmilla didn't back down, or remove Laura's finger from her face. "It's not my project."

Laura’s scowl deepened, and she poked Carmilla’s chest, hard. "You're overseeing it!"

"I had to." Carmilla leant forwards, seemingly unwilling to give ground, even with the deep-seated apathy Laura could see in her eyes. "I was assigned here today. I'll be gone tomorrow, don't you worry your little amateur head."

They were close enough now that Laura could feel the stillness under Carmilla's skin, the way she wasn't bothering to breathe when she didn't need to speak. "Maybe you should be the one worrying, _Carmilla_. I might be the one in the caves, but you're the one that isn't able to care for the people standing right in front of you."

The vampire watched Laura, her posture drawn in tight, though Laura hadn't noticed her moving. "Get back," she said, her jaw clenched, "to work."

Laura laughed, a bitter sound she'd learned from the last week in the mines. She stepped back, giving Carmilla the space she'd been unwilling to admit she wanted. Her pick weighed a ton in her hand, but she didn't drop it. Laura breathed hard, the sounds all too loud against the echoing silence at the top of the precipice. "God, even I wish you could feel something. Maybe then you'd be able to see what you were right in the middle of." Laura took another step back, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Something animal in her was all too aware of Carmilla's danger. "Aren't you paying attention, Carmilla? You're standing over a revolution in the making and you don't even see it." 

Laura turned her back on the vampire, and started the trip back to her assigned spot. Her feet almost skittered out from underneath her a few times, gravity making the trip down much harder than the trip up. At the top, Carmilla seemed to having a problem with gravity, too, her shoulders caved in. Laura felt guilty, but only a little. Whether she had intended to or not, Carmilla was playing a part in this endless agony.  

Laura jammed her pick back in the rock, and pulled. Stones clattered loose, but not enough to cover the sound of the voice, booming down through the cavern. "Hey, idiots, in case you haven't noticed, you're supposed to be excavating _that side_." 

Laura swung her pick into the wall again, ducking her head to hide her victorious smile. 

**3\. Starting Early**

Laura got lost on the way back from her tour. Over the course of a day, she'd been shown the coolest things on this campus — the awesome dorms, one of the basement classrooms, and even a parade of frat boys in donkey masks. How cool a tradition was that? None of the other universities she’d toured had even come _close_  to this level of unique flavour. 

She'd been distracted by the parade, though. Laura had taken so many pictures that her phone died, which she hadn’t regretted until she looked up and realized she had no idea where she was. Her dad was probably worried, but Laura put that aside. He’d insisted on a travel-sized bear spray for her fanny pack, one that she clutched now. The light was falling inexplicably fast. Maybe it was the mountains? Laura was pretty sure she'd read something about mountains affecting-

"I don't suppose you need a roommate," someone drawled from behind her, and Laura yelped. She whipped around, her bear spray in hand, but it was just another student, a magenta streak in her hair the only colour on her person. She was cased in black leather, which Laura thought was a direct affront to her poor, innocent gay soul. "Okay, listen, cutie, I don't think I deserve that."

Laura winced. All of a sudden, she was hyperaware of what she was wearing. She felt incredibly juvenile, compared to the other girl's leather pants. Leather pants that looked really, really good. "Sorry. I uh-" 

The girl waved a hand. She didn’t sound drunk, exactly, but exhausted and exasperated. "Thought I was a Zeta." 

Laura frowned. 

"A big, hulking bro," the girl explained, and snorted. Her lipstick was smudged, and incredibly dark. Laura couldn't see her well in the shadows swallowing the street, but it looked very, very red. "I'm not one of them. I'm Carmilla."

"Laura," Laura said, and stuffed the bear spray in her pocket to offer her hand. Carmilla didn't take it, instead considering Laura, up and down. Laura went completely red, but Carmilla didn’t seem to notice. Carmilla opened her mouth, Laura half-anticipating, half-dreading her response, when Carmilla changed tack. She cocked her head, her gaze snapping to a nearby alley. Laura felt her eyebrows creeping together. “Are you okay?”

Carmilla held up a finger, and Laura quieted. Now that she was focusing, she could hear something too. Something… big.  

"Would it be bad if I said you had to come with me?” Carmilla said, and under the playfulness, Laura could sense something serious. She shivered, though it wasn’t _that_  cold. Carmilla examined her nails, and in the flickering streetlights that were beginning to light, Laura could see they were ragged. Scraped-on-something-rough, ragged. Blood-under-the-nails, ragged. "I mean, you could stay and wander the streets, but you'd probably get eaten."

Laura's voice pitched high. The bear spray suddenly seemed like a good idea again. In the alley, something clattered and scraped. Her nerves sparked. "Eaten?" 

Carmilla tilted her head to the side, her eyes shining like a cat. Something about the set of her shoulders made Laura sure she was focusing on the sounds, slowly getting closer. "I wouldn't usually care, but it's been a long day, and you're more pleasant to look at than Curly Sue." 

"I'm sure I'm more pleasant to look at if I'm alive!" Laura yelped, and Carmilla's smile broadened. Lipstick lingered between her teeth, and her hand was dead-cold when she grabbed Laura’s hand. Even so, she was a lot friendlier than the _thing_  that was hauling itself out of the mouth of the alley, bubbling with shadows. 

“Run!"

**4\. Starting Late**

When Laura had received her first assignment for the Voice of Silas, she'd thought her boss was joking. Find out the source of the geological unrest on campus, really? Laura was an almost-graduated investigative journalist, not a rock person. There had to be someone better qualified. It wasn’t that this work was below her — Laura sure wanted to know what had caused her TARDIS mug to rattle itself off her bedside table — but it wasn’t the kind of thing she was confident about solving. 

Rock science or no, Laura always did her best. Silas hadn’t invested in anything helpful, like a seismograph, so Laura was left with gossip. In this case, that meant tracking down every rumour. There were two, which was unusually low. Even things like mushrooms had at least five conspiracy theories attached to them in a place like Silas. 

The first rumour was that the secret was linked somehow to the contents of the pecan pies, but Laura knew better than to mess with the lunch ladies. That left her with the second rumour, the one she was _highly_  skeptical about. 

Laura’s lead drew her to an imposing house just off campus, the sort that usually had professors squatting in it. She tried knocking, but that didn't work.  

So Laura walked in. It wasn’t breaking in if the door was open! She’d researched that fact specifically. 

Laura followed the sound of voices through the hallway, all the way through to a series of connected living rooms. The occupants didn't seem to notice that she'd walked in, or that she existed at all. They were muttering the same lines over and over. It sounded like a poem, maybe. Or maybe they were studying for ancient Sumerian mythology? Silas couldn't seem to offer classical mythology like a sensible school. 

“Four to make a circle, four to make a cage. The word, the blood, the cage, the liar's heart presaged. That’s the only new thing we have.” Laura edged a little more into the room, quietly, but not excessively so. The voice was coming from a chair, from the girl buried deep in it like she wanted to physically represent her studying slump. “And that’s all the stuff we’ve got, unless you want to go back to ‘for the dead, the ocean, the bones, and the great grass plains. For every point a shackle closed, for the dead, the ocean, the bones, and the great grass plains. For the dead, the ocean, the bones, and’ it keeps going on like that for,” a ruffle of pages, a deadpan voice. “A while.” 

The other person, close enough to Laura that she jumped, snorted. "Remind me if I’m ever writing a world-saving book of prophecies that extended metaphor’s a bad look.”

Armchair girl snorted right back. “You think?"

Laura cleared her throat. The girl draped across the armchair jumped to her feet like a cat, and the redhead spun on the spot, their eyes wide. "Who are you?"

Laura cut her eyes between them and the open door, and then the giant poster board they had plastered with yarn and hand drawn pictures. It looked like a sixth grader's 'mythological things that want to eat me' project. "Laura Hollis, journalist for Voice of Silas."

Dead silence. The girl on the armchair groaned, dropping back into the chair and letting her head fall back, her hair tumbling down. It was very, very hard not to stare. She was the sort of beautiful Laura was used to seeing in museums. "Get out."

Laura made an indignant noise. She couldn't help but feel offended — she’d waited a _long_  time to be able to say that. "I will not get out! I've heard from reputable sources," the alchemy club, but nobody needed to know that, "that you two know what's been going on! Earthquakes! A fish! Semi slavery of the campus! I like my pounds of flesh where they are, thank you very much."

The redhead sighed, and offered Laura a hand. It was calloused in strange spots, like they spent a lot of time holding delicate tools. Their grip was firm, but not crushing. "LaFontaine. And that's Carmilla," they said, and jerked their head at their companion. "Ignore her. She’s stuck on... the homework."

Laura put her released hand on her hips, the clipboard smacking against her ribs. So much for a lead. "Really? You're struggling with _that_?"

"Um," LaFontaine said, vaguely offended. Now that Laura was closer to them, she realized the callouses were probably from extensive science. They smelled like an explosion. "It's kind of ancient, barely translatable Sumerian? She's doing pretty well." 

Laura scoffed, and narrowly avoided staring at Carmilla, who looked dead inside. Still striking, though, which was unfair. "It's four items. You keep saying them. Four to make a cage? Whatever you're trying to translate, you're not looking at the actual outcome. The word, the heart-" 

"What," Carmilla said, and if Laura hadn't been looking at her again, she would have been convinced that Carmilla's head had just exploded. The book Carmilla had been holding fell to the floor with a dull _thud_. Her eyes were wide. “What."

Laura blinked. “What, what? It's obvious!" 

LaFontaine stared at their notes, then back up at Laura, a giant grin breaking across their face. "Hey, Hollis, how would you like to stop the apocalypse?"

**5\. Starting From the Middle**

 

"She wants them now." 

Another voice, tight with rage. "Now?"

Laura came to with a fight, her mind soggy with sleep. Her ear and cheek ached. She sat up, slowly, her keyboard keys popping out of dents in her face. In front of her, the red light was still blinking — she’d fallen asleep trying to vlog again. In the time it took her to get oriented, the voices stopped, and for a moment Laura thought she’d imagined them. 

Until she turned.  

Carmilla was standing in the door, one of Kirsch's fraternity bros lounging on the other side. Her arms were braced on the doorframe, her body blocking the opening like she thought she could stop him. She _had_  whacked Kirsch pretty hard the other day, so there might’ve been some truth to it. “Will. Don’t try it."

"Don't tell me you're getting soft again," Will said scornfully. He peered over Carmilla's head at Laura, still groggy in her chair. "What's our little nuisance's name? Laura?" Laura jerked upright, and Will's face twisted to something even more unpleasant. "Oh, sis. L again? Do you have a soft spot for-"

Carmilla belted him. Laura sprang to her feet, her stapler clutched tight in her hand. She could have sworn she'd heard a bone crack but Will just straightened, something popping ominously, and scowled. "Now, now, kitty. You wouldn't want to do anything rash. Does Mother need to send you into time out again?"

Carmilla put her hand back on the doorframe, the wood creaking under her grip. Laura wondered if they were going to wake up the rest of the dorm, if anyone even cared they were being threatened by a Zeta. Carmilla’s shoulders were nearly around her ears, and Laura saw iron in the set of them. Her sense of unease grew. "Tell mother," Carmilla gritted out, "that I am sticking to the plan." 

"She said to tell _you_  that the plan has changed." Will said, and Laura grabbed the knife out of the book on the desk, ignoring the suddenly fluttering pages. Will raised an eyebrow at the both of them. His body was bracketed by Carmilla’s arms, her whole body on a razor’s edge. "Now step aside."

Carmilla leant back, seeming to consider it. Laura's heart pounded in her ears, her palms slick on her weapons. The book rattled on the desk, considering making a break for it. Carmilla turned to look at Laura, just for a moment. Laura set her shoulders. Her fingers settled better on the hilt of the knife, her years of Krav Maga coming back to her. The small line between Carmilla’s eyes smoothed out. Then, Carmilla turned back to the hulking boy and said, casually, "No."

**+1 Starting Too Late**

Carmilla listened carefully to the murmurs from the tent. There were dozens of humans in there, most from the decidedly less supernatural universities in the region around Silas. Civilians, mostly. Unprepared. Incredibly mortal. 

They were trying to figure out who was in charge. How cute. 

"Has anyone seen-"

"Shh! She's a-"

"Nobody can listen from so-"

"General Hollis!"

The voices stopped abruptly, and if Carmilla wasn't mistaken, there were a couple whacks and sharp noises — salutes. She couldn't help but feel surprised. They were more organized than she'd thought. Than _Mother_  had thought. 

That was good news. Any news was good news, when you were waging a war. Maybe Carmilla _would_  have useful information to report back, not that she wanted to. Wartime had made life easier than she’d ever experienced. Lilita's attention lingered on the petty little humans, instead of her vampire children. After the years combined between the coffin and playing bait for Mother’s little games, Carmilla appreciated any sort of break.  

A break that would end tomorrow. Good times never lasted. Carmilla was used to that, too. Ell had been a very, very effective lesson.

Carmilla smiled as the tent flap opened, loosing someone on the fog. It was thick enough that the person's shape was obscured for a brief moment — but whoever Hollis was, they walked with confidence. 

The second the fog cleared enough to get a clear image, Carmilla was underwhelmed. Hollis was shorter than she was, just enough that Carmilla would be able to taunt her about it if she liked. Her shoulders were set higher than Carmilla's, though, enough that Carmilla felt herself snap to attention. 

"You must be Mircalla," Hollis said, and her voice carried the same iron as her spine. The mist swayed around her, just visible to Carmilla's vampire eyes. She smelled sweet, like cookies and sugar and icing. "Vampire, right?"

Carmilla scowled. Typical Mother. A power play — anything to get to her. Even across a mountain range, Carmilla was never truly away from her influence. "Carmilla, actually."

Hollis cocked her head. She didn't seem the slightest bit bothered that she was dealing with a creature of the night. Most people were on edge, frightened, something. Hollis had none of that. For someone so young... Carmilla revised her impression to grudgingly impressed. "Carmilla. I'm Laura."

She offered a hand, and Carmilla was more impressed still. She shook it, Laura's hand firm in hers. It was odd, to be touching something warm. It had been since- "I'd say it was nice to meet you, but there's not much point in pleasantries when you'll be a smear on the mountains tomorrow." 

Laura snorted and withdrew her hand. "Smear? That's ambitious of you." She crossed her arms across her chest, which Carmilla was _not_  looking at. Ell’s image flickered in her mind, a second and gone. "It would be a lot better for your evil, over the top regime to just set us on fire or something." Her eyes widened, the first time she was flustered, and she'd done it to herself. Carmilla’s lips twitched. "Not that you should set us on fire!" 

"I'll take that under advisement," Carmilla said dryly. Laura flushed. The abyss inside Carmilla echoed. "The Dean is in charge, not me."

Laura shrugged. Her military posture was slowly relaxing into something almost sardonic. For a doomed treaty meeting, it was going well. Carmilla had forgotten how odd humans could be. "If you can't effect any change, why are you here?"

"I'm hungry," Carmilla said, and smiled. Laura's eyes, already on her lips, flickered away. Smart girl. "Mother wanted to see what you were willing to give up."

It couldn't have been a surprise to Laura, who Carmilla knew had been leading the troops since they left base, but she flinched anyway. "Nothing. Unless-" she grinned, her eyes fixed on a point in the sunset, and Carmilla's empty heart shuddered. Laura looked like Ell, suddenly, hardened but kind. "Unless of course, we want to leave each other alone. And that means you stop tunnelling for doomsday." 

Carmilla laughed. She didn’t bother to make it bitter. "Some days, I wish."

Laura looked up at that, her eyes flickering from Carmilla's mouth to her eyes. She had a strong gaze. Mattie would have called her _precocious_ , if they ever could meet. "You could join us."

Carmilla shook her head. Her skin was clammy from sitting out in the fog for so long. Combined with the red of the sunset, the situation was beginning to remind her a little too much of her coffin. "I really couldn't."

They watched each other a moment. Laura would have been a good soldier for Silas, if anything had been different. Carmilla would have enjoyed that. Anything to break up the monotony, to distract Mother’s attention. Maybe even something to draw Carmilla’s attention, if she was lucky enough. 

Before Carmilla could say anything inadvisable, someone else ducked out of the tent, tall and excruciatingly redheaded. Unlike the now-relaxed Laura, her shoulders were stiff enough to give Carmilla a strain just looking at her. "General Hollis, we need you."

Laura turned back to the tent in the mist for a split second, waving the soldier off, then back to Carmilla, looking almost wistful. Duty settled back over her, evening her disposition to military again. Laura opened her mouth, and it faltered again. "I-"

Carmilla offered a languid shrug. She could feel Lilita's lingering disapproval over the miles she'd have to run back to Silas. Laura looked at her like they were just two girls and noting more, and she felt irrevocably sad. "It's war, cutie."

Laura squared her shoulders. In this weather, in this place, she looked anything but a feeble human. People murmured in the tent, worried for her, alone with a vampire. Fools. Carmilla was the one they should have been pitying. General Hollis wasn’t anything but strong. "Don't expect to win."

Carmilla stood, stretched, letting her form flicker for a brief second. Laura didn't flinch at that, either. Carmilla stared off to the mountains, where her unlife waited. It had never been appealing, but now it was even less. "It was... nice to meet you. Enjoy your night."

Laura nodded. Her eyes were sad, but steely. She took a step back, the mist starting to curl around her in solid tendrils. "Enjoy yours."

Carmilla saluted her lazily, and transformed, bounding off for Silas. Laura's scent carried with her in the mist, and Carmilla wondered if her blood would taste as sweet. 

She would learn in the morning, whether she wished things would be different or not.  

**Author's Note:**

> Come over and say hi at writerproblem193.tumblr.com where I am dying to talk about this fic! Tell me which universe was your favourite! I'm also accepting minific prompts, so come be a part of content creation! You can even make me write something _fluffy_ for Valentine's Day, if you want!
> 
> Special thanks to LMoriarty yet again for catching my typos. I need to learn how to type, clearly.
> 
> You're free to translate or podfic this, just tell me so that I can be all excited about it!


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